living with lung cancer: a lesson in finding your purpose
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jan pezarro (left) decided to turn her lung cancer into a new path forward. she went back to school for a master's degree in writing and has become an advocate for lung cancer early screening.
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jan pezarro was lured into smoking back in the 1970s. it was a very different era from a health perspective when smoking was not only socially acceptable, it was prominent in advertising, movies and daily living.
“physicians were prescribing to women to lose their baby weight, they should start smoking,” says jan, 70, a vancouver retired management consultant, grandmother of two and outspoken advocate for lung cancer awareness.
a former smoker herself, pezarro has gone through lung cancer and come out the other side of the diagnosis and then two additional growths (along with radiation treatment and surgery). she’s been cured three times, she says.
while she’s in the clear now, there’s no knowing when her cancer will be back.
lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in canada, according to the canadian cancer society. about 72 per cent of lung cancer cases in canada are from smoking tobacco. the longer a person smokes and the more cigarettes they smoke each day, the higher their risk of cancer increases. but almost 30 per cent of lung cancer cases are not related to smoking.
despite her history, biomarker testing of her tumour confirmed that jan’s lung cancer is not caused by her former smoking addiction.
“i got pulled in. i was a dancer and one of my fellow dancers had this really good idea that we could smoke and that would keep our weight down. it was true.” also in the 70s, jan says doctors were suggesting that women smoke so that the babies would be smaller, making childbirth safer for moms.
“i lived through it, but to go back with this new lens, the stories are just horrifying,” she admits. “my smoking history would have spanned, i’m embarrassed to say, probably 30 years, although i quit for both my pregnancies. amazing when you have something bigger than yourself that somehow enables you to fight it.” along the way, she tried everything to quit, from wearing a nicotine patch to hypnosis.
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diagnosed with lung cancer: ‘it was absolutely devastating’
her lung cancer diagnosis in 2015 was “an incidental finding”—she was lucky it was detected.
as a high-powered executive working 60-hour weeks, she thought feeling not quite herself might mean a heart problem that runs in the family. her doctor referred her for tests, including blood work, an ultrasound and a chest x-ray. everything was fine except her doctor noticed something on the chest x-ray that needed further investigation, so jan went to see a respirologist.
it was lung cancer.
“it was absolutely devastating. we bring all our history, all our beliefs with us. so when i was given a diagnosis of cancer, of course, i assumed immediately that i was going to die.”
she decided to take steps to get her final days in order, updating her will and buying little diamond earrings for her two daughters, then 30 and 25, “because i always thought i would give them that,” she says. when her mother died, jan realized there were still many things she wished she had asked her, so she asked her daughters if they had any questions for her. the younger one wanted letters from her mom on special days like her wedding and the birth of her first child.
“my girls were so amazing, but writing those was unbelievably hard.” jan and her husband took a trip where they went ziplining, which represented how jan needed to “let go and surrender.”
they returned home, and jan had the right upper lobe of her lung removed, which is about 40 per cent of your right lung. she spent six days in the hospital, but when she came out, her neighbour asked her to join her on a weekly walk. the first day, she could hardly make it to the gate at the driveway. the second time, they got to the end of the block and the third excursion was a trek to the coffee shop. now 10 years later, the two walk eight kilometres every sunday, sometimes in the beautiful paths through the nearby mountains to mix in a forest bath.
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“i now have lost 40 per cent of my lungs between the three treatments, so i’m still good. i can still downhill ski. i just need to stop and then let my body recover and then i can go again. so it’s the same with walking. if there’s a lot of hills, i just need to pace myself and stop and then keep going. but i think that the exercise part is so important.”
lung cancer recurrence and finding a new purpose
when her cancer recurred, she went into depression, but says it was an opportunity to find her purpose. she traded in her consulting work for pursuing a master’s degree in writing.
“i started back to school because i love to learn,” she says, taking her mind away from the worry about her cancer coming back. her project was her memoir, a 75,000-word manuscript, which is a story that interweaves “true crime chapters” of smoking trends that drew many women into addiction.
she got through the removal of her right middle lobe in 2020 and her left lower lobe in 2022, and graduated with her master’s in may 2024, marking her path forward as a lung cancer awareness advocate. while some things have changed in lung cancer treatment, others haven’t progressed, and she talks passionately about how when she was diagnosed in 2015, lung cancer at stage one statistics showed survivability was 65 per cent at the five-year point.
“so as a patient, you go, ok, that means 35 per cent, a third of people, will die. and that was what was behind all of my planning with my girls,” jan explains, adding that now that number is 80 per cent survivability. but the key is to find it early.
“sadly, still today, 50 per cent of lung cancer is found at stage 4.”
why? she says the lungs are a big organ with no nerves, so you don’t experience symptoms until very late in the cancer. her crusade is for early detection screening.
“i had 40 years of cervical screening. i had 30 years of mammograms and never had cervical or breast cancer. the goal is lung screening just becomes one of the things that we screen for.”
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british columbia had the first screening program in 2022, but the eligibility differs across the country and most is based on a long history of smoking.
the conversation brings her back to the stigma of smoking that is far more recent than people realize.
“stigma is a social construct. when i was growing up in the 60s, half the adults smoked and you wouldn’t invite a divorcee to a dinner party, but you would have cigarettes on the coffee table. so, for this whole stigma that’s happening now, i love that tobacco control has reduced the incidence of smoking, but it’s created this new problem: stigma causes shame. and then that can lead people to not enter cessation programs, to not get screened, and even from physicians i’ve spoken to, to not get treated because they ‘deserve it.’ nobody, nobody deserves lung cancer.”
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